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作者：Guiso, Luigi; Sapienza, Paola; Zingales, Luigi
作者单位：Northwestern University; University of Chicago
摘要：We study whether a positive historical shock can generate long-term persistence in development. We show that Italian cities that achieved self-government in the Middle Ages have a higher level of civic capital today than similar cities in the same area that did not. The size of this effect increases with the length of the period of independence and its intensity. This effect persists even after accounting for the fact that cities did not become independent randomly. We conjecture that the Midd...
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作者：Burda, Michael C.; Weder, Mark
作者单位：Humboldt University of Berlin; University of Adelaide
摘要：Payroll taxes represent a major distortionary influence of governments on labor markets. This paper examines the role of time-varying payroll taxes and the social safety net for cyclical fluctuations in a nonmonetary economy with labor market frictions and unemployment insurance, when the latter is only imperfectly related to search effort. A balanced social insurance budget induces countercyclical payroll taxation, renders gross wages more rigid over the cycle and strengthens the model's endo...
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作者：Kaminsky, Graciela Laura; Vega-Garcia, Pablo
作者单位：George Washington University
摘要：The theoretical literature on sovereign defaults has focused on adverse shocks to debtors' economies, suggesting that defaults are of an idiosyncratic nature. Still, sovereign debt crises are also of a systemic nature, clustered around panics in the financial center, such as the European Sovereign Debt Crisis in the aftermath of the US Subprime Crisis in 2008. Crises in the financial centers are rare disasters and, thus, their effects on the periphery can only be captured by examining long epi...
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作者：Barth, Erling; Moene, Karl Ove
作者单位：University of Oslo
摘要：We explore how more wage equality fuels the generosity of the welfare state via political competition in elections, and how a more generous welfare state fuels wage equality via empowerment of weak groups in the labor market. Together the two mechanisms may generate a cumulative process that explains how equality multiplies, and why countries with more equal distributions of market outcomes also have stronger welfare states. The complementarity between wage setting and welfare spending can exp...
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作者：Azmat, Ghazala; Calsamiglia, Caterina; Iriberri, Nagore
作者单位：University of London; Queen Mary University London; University of Basque Country
摘要：It is commonly perceived that increasing incentives improves performance. However, the reaction to increased incentives might differ between men and women, leading to gender differences in performance. In a natural experiment, we study the gender difference in performance resulting from changes in stakes. We use detailed information on the performance of high-school students and exploit the variation in the stakes of tests, which range from 5% to 27% of the final grade. We find that female stu...
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作者：Dube, Oeindrila; Garcia-Ponce, Omar; Thom, Kevin
作者单位：New York University
摘要：Understanding how economic incentives affect illegal drug production is essential for crafting policies in response to the international drug trade. Policymakers typically face a choice between two strategies: targeting criminal groups via law enforcement, and offering producers incentives to engage in alternate activities. Yet, little is known about how the returns to alternate legal activities affect drug supply. We contribute to this literature by examining how shocks to legal commodity pri...
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作者：Lancia, Francesco; Russo, Alessia
作者单位：University of Vienna; University of Oslo
摘要：Adynamic political economy theory of fiscal policy is presented to explain the simultaneous existence of public education and pensions in modern democracies. The driving force of the model is the intergenerational conflict over the allocation of the public budget. Successive generations of voters choose fiscal policies through repeated elections. The political power of elderly voters creates the motive for adults to support public investment in the human capital of future generations since it ...
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作者：Kalemli-Oezcan, Sebnem; Reinhart, Carmen; Rogoff, Kenneth
作者单位：Center for Economic & Policy Research (CEPR); University System of Maryland; University of Maryland College Park; National Bureau of Economic Research; Harvard University
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作者：Griffith, Rachel; Lluberas, Rodrigo; Luhrmann, Melanie
作者单位：University of London; London School Economics & Political Science; University of Manchester; University ORT Uruguay; University of London; Royal Holloway University London
摘要：The rise in obesity has largely been attributed to an increase in calorie consumption. We show that official government household survey data indicate that levels of calorie consumption have declined in England between 1980 and 2013; while there has been an increase in calories from food eaten out at restaurants, fast food, soft drinks and confectionery, overall there has been a decrease in total calories purchased. Households have shifted towards more expensive calories, both by substituting ...
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作者：Butler, Jeffrey V.; Giuliano, Paola; Guiso, Luigi
作者单位：Louisiana State University System; Louisiana State University; University of California System; University of California Los Angeles
摘要：We investigate the relationship between individual trust and individual economic performance. We find that individual income is hump-shaped in a measure of intensity of trust beliefs. Our interpretation is that highly trusting individuals tend to assume too much social risk and to be cheated more often, ultimately performing less well than those with a belief close to the mean trustworthiness of the population. However, individuals with overly pessimistic beliefs avoid being cheated, but give ...
